This invention relates to a baseball bat swing training apparatus for assisting a baseball player in practicing his swing for insuring a proper swing.
It is well known in the sport of baseball for a player to achieve the maximum benefit from his power in hitting a ball he must have a proper swing over the strike zone and there have been many prior devices for training a baseball player in his swing. These usually include a pair of spaced horizontally disposed parallel arms sometimes having means for holding a ball associated with one of the parallel arms. The arms are usually mounted to a plate having a track therein providing for adjustment of the arms in the horizontal direction.
In prior U.S. Pat. No. 2,443,131, means are provided for assisting a player in developing a level swing. This device is not entirely successful in accomplishing the objective because it does not provide for realistic contact with a baseball and does not provide for adjustability depending upon the areas relative to the strike zone a player is having difficulty maintaining a level swing in. In U.S. Pat. No. 3,940,131 a training device is shown which provides vertically spaced horizontal extending arms which may be raised or lowered to various positions. In U.S. Pat. No. 3,904,199 a device for assisting a baseball player in practicing his swing is shown having a pair of spaced horizontally disposed parallel arms having means for holding a ball associated with the bottom arm. The arms are mounted to a plate having a track therein providing for adjustment of the arms in a horizontal direction. In U.S. Pat. No. 4,516,771, a batting practice device has arms vertically spaced from one another and extending substantially horizontal from the mounting plate to form an unobstructed substantially horizontal target area for passage of a bat therebetween during a practice swing. In the Ferretti U.S. Pat. No. 3,039,770, an adjustable pitching tee is provided having a telescoping post for holding a baseball or the like for batting practice. These prior art devices typically extend a pair of horizontally extending arms parallel to each other with the batter positioned directly in front of the ends of the arms for swinging between the arms.
In contrast to these devices, the present invention has the batter standing beside a pair of sloping parallel arms so that the bat is guided through a slope swing over the length of the parallel arms to control the swing as the bat approaches the plate. To accomplish this, the arms must be cantilevered in such a fashion so that the arms are supported out of the way at both ends for swinging the bat through the length of the arms and this is accomplished in the present invention with a pair of parallel arms forming a bent "U" shape positioned at a predetermined slope.